From the Bookshelf: My First Love's Kiss
Jan. 6th, 2025 06:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerIt wasn’t until I’d acquired the second volume of My First Love’s Kiss in rapid succession after the first that I realised the cover was on “the wrong side.” I hadn’t started buying another “girls’ love” manga, but a “light novel” series. With the way I now try to track down what manga is becoming available for purchase, I suppose my confusion was explainable. Having read a girls’ love manga with the art provided by the illustrator Fly (who I first became aware of through the Bottom-Tier Character Tomozaki novels) played its own role too.
For all that this neither helped with those nagging thoughts I’m not starting as much new manga as I once did nor with those other, longer-rooted nagging thoughts that I don’t take in enough “respectable” fiction in whatever format to make for fully relaxed thoughts about less reputable stuff checking my boxes, I still started reading the first novel by Hitoma Iruma, credited on the back cover as the author of Adachi and Shimamura, a girls’ love series I’ve been aware of for some time without getting to. There is the thought that falling in love is a matter of internal states. The translation was decent enough, even if I wondered about one of Takasora Hoshi’s first thoughts about Umi Mizuike, the withdrawn daughter of a “gossamery woman” imposing on the hospitality of Takasora’s mother on a basis said to be temporary, being taking note of Umi’s ample breasts.
When the first-person narration shifted to Umi’s perspective, it did take just a little getting used to in part because I hadn’t quite noticed any difference between the “voices.” I did sort out something revealed in the fold-out colour plate at the start of the volume, though. Umi is involved in a “compensated dating” situation with an apparently well-off young woman. This does make the romantic entanglements distinctive, even if I’m conscious most of all of describing my own surprise and denying that to potential readers who see this first. Having started some lengthy “light novel” series where the first volume seems to have been written so it could stand alone in a pinch, I was a bit surprised by this volume ending without much sign of that. Hitoma Iruma’s afterword does mention plans for a “three-volume series,” though; if that stays the case I have two-thirds of it accumulated already.
For all that this neither helped with those nagging thoughts I’m not starting as much new manga as I once did nor with those other, longer-rooted nagging thoughts that I don’t take in enough “respectable” fiction in whatever format to make for fully relaxed thoughts about less reputable stuff checking my boxes, I still started reading the first novel by Hitoma Iruma, credited on the back cover as the author of Adachi and Shimamura, a girls’ love series I’ve been aware of for some time without getting to. There is the thought that falling in love is a matter of internal states. The translation was decent enough, even if I wondered about one of Takasora Hoshi’s first thoughts about Umi Mizuike, the withdrawn daughter of a “gossamery woman” imposing on the hospitality of Takasora’s mother on a basis said to be temporary, being taking note of Umi’s ample breasts.
When the first-person narration shifted to Umi’s perspective, it did take just a little getting used to in part because I hadn’t quite noticed any difference between the “voices.” I did sort out something revealed in the fold-out colour plate at the start of the volume, though. Umi is involved in a “compensated dating” situation with an apparently well-off young woman. This does make the romantic entanglements distinctive, even if I’m conscious most of all of describing my own surprise and denying that to potential readers who see this first. Having started some lengthy “light novel” series where the first volume seems to have been written so it could stand alone in a pinch, I was a bit surprised by this volume ending without much sign of that. Hitoma Iruma’s afterword does mention plans for a “three-volume series,” though; if that stays the case I have two-thirds of it accumulated already.